A friend of mine recently recounted an interaction with one of her co-workers. Described as a generally nice guy, he had attempted to convince her that code camps were “basically the new engineering degree.” He had gone to one himself, and, in the end, the two of them had ended up in the same place. This, understandably, gave her pause; after all, she had attended the University of Waterloo’s computer engineering program, and then the University of Toronto for her master’s in engineering.

After some thought, she asked whether the particular code camp he had attended had touched on security, infrastructure, or operating systems; it was a question asked with the intention of understanding his comparison. Flustered, he responded that roles in those areas were so niche that his statement still stood.

My friend recognized that her co-worker’s statement had some truth to it. Yes, they had ended up in the same place. What troubled her was that he failed to understand that the breadth of his knowledge was unlikely to take him to the deeply technical reaches of big tech, where he ultimately wanted to end up.

He just didn’t know what he didn’t know. And not only that, he believed that my friend, in completing her degrees, was the one who had been conned.

Code Camps and the Messaging Around Them

There is a pattern of rhetoric that multiple colleagues of mine have observed with code camp graduates, and it includes the belief that web and app development are essentially the entirety of the field.

It isn’t surprising. The current narrative is just that; coding is becoming synonymous with web development. This equivalence can be seen on several boot camp sites, and even in highly frequented publications such as the New York Times.

The industry is expanding rapidly, but areas like SaaS, devices, security, systems engineering (required for coveted…